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France

Macron’s landslide win a emphatic mandate for liberal democracy

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Emmanuel Macron won the French presidency on Sunday before addressing the country n front of the Louvre. (Facebook)

Ultimately, a 30-point landslide portends more significance than a 20-point landslide. 

French voters emphatically rejected Marine Le Pen, though not, perhaps, by the same margin as they rejected her father 15 years ago. But polls, which showed Emmanuel Macron’s 20-point lead shrinking ever so slightly two weeks ago, rebounded after the sole debate during the runoff campaign. Macron’s ultimate margin of victory was beyond what polls were even showing by the end of last week.

Generally, Le Pen and the hard-right Front national knew that a win was highly unlikely. A ‘victory’ would have been winning over 40% of the vote by, say, winning over a majority of the first-round supporters of François Fillon, the candidate of the center-right Les Républicains — or at least winning majorities in the southeast and north of France where Le Pen’s support was strongest.

Instead, Le Pen didn’t even break 34% nationally. She won just two departments: Pas-de-Calais and Aisne in the north of the country. In Paris, the French political, administrative, financial and cultural capital, she won just 10.3% of the vote. Le Pen’s performance fell so short of hopes and expectations that she now hopes to rename her party before next month’s parliamentary elections and could face internal questions about her leadership. Continue reading Macron’s landslide win a emphatic mandate for liberal democracy →

France

Le Pen’s moment is now, not in 2022 — but she’s already blown it

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Marine Le Pen campaigns on the south coast of France. (Facebook)

Every piece of election-related data we have suggests Emmanuel Macron will win this weekend’s presidential runoff in France and, by the standards of most political contests, it will be a landslide — perhaps a victory of more than 20%.

But it comes with a sense of disquiet, even among Macron’s supporters.

Part of it is lingering anxiety from last June’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential election last November. That’s understandable. But the polls are far more slanted in Macron’s favor than they ever were for ‘Remain’ or for Hillary Clinton.

Polls haven’t been enough to stop niggling doubts that Marine Le Pen might somehow win just enough center-right voters, while just enough leftist voters are too disillusioned to vote for the aggressively centrist Macron, to score an upset victory. But pluralities of the supporters of third-placed conservative former prime minister François Fillon and fourth-placed hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon alike say they will support Macron in the July 7 runoff.

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RELATED: Why France’s election result is still more of the same

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Macron’s campaign for the last week, too, has been somewhat tone-deaf. Of course, a candidate who comes from the political and financial elite might have rethought holding an election-night party at a posh Paris bistro. Le Pen crashed his campaign stop last week at a Whirlpool factory, forcing a sheepish Macron to spend an hour talking to working-class voters. Macron, ultimately, spent far more time trying to engage the workers than Le Pen, who posed for some selfies. But the stunt worked — and made Macron look defensive.

There, too, is a sense that Le Pen’s endorsement from right-wing presidential contender Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and a handful of stragglers on the French right (along with Mélenchon’s refusal to endorse Macron) lacks the urgency of the broad ‘republican front’ that met the shock 2002 French runoff between Jacques Chirac and Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

So what gives?

2022.  Continue reading Le Pen’s moment is now, not in 2022 — but she’s already blown it →

France

Why France’s election result is still ‘more of the same’

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Emmanuel Macron’s first-round victory and wide polling lead against Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election all but assures him of victory in the runoff on May 7. (Facebook)

After a roller-coaster presidential election, the first-round results came with little surprise — almost exactly as pollsters predicted.

French voters will choose in a May 7 runoff between two presidential contenders who increasingly embody the two dominant political views of the 2010s: cosmopolitan liberalism and protectionist nationalism.

The frontrunner, Emmanuel Macron, is a former economy minister who got his start in politics under outgoing president François Hollande and a former member of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) running as an independent centrist under his formed En marche movement.

His opponent is Front national leader Marine Le Pen, who is waging a hard-right nationalist campaign opposed to globalization, European integration, immigration and the creeping influence of Islam on secular France. Though they may not carry the banners of the two major parties of French politics, in key ways, Macron and Le Pen represent less rupture and ‘more of the same.’

2017 runoff set to unfold much like 2002’s election

Almost certainly, French voters will choose Macron as their next president by a wide margin in 15 days — he has held a consistent and durable polling lead of more than 20% against Le Pen.

The third-placed candidate, former conservative prime minister François Fillon, of Les Républicains, has already endorsed Macron in the runoff (though former president Nicolas Sarkozy, sharply, has not).  So has Benoît Hamon, the official Socialist candidate, and Hollande followed suit today. Former prime minister Manuel Valls, the runner-up to Hamon for the Socialist nomination in January, had already endorsed Macron in the first round. Hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has not yet endorsed Macron over Le Pen, but Pierre Laurent, the head of France’s Communist Party, has already done so.

Continue reading Why France’s election result is still ‘more of the same’ →